Carol Wilson raised an interesting point in an article in Light Reading on SDN and NFV—that of collaboration. I’m happy that she found the approach CloudNFV has taken to collaboration and openness credible, but I think some more general comments on the topic would be helpful to those who want to assess how “open” a…
It should be clear to everyone in networking this week that the industry is moving to a very different place. There was a time when the limiting factor in entertainment, communications, and empowerment was delivery. We spent like sailors (as they say) to get better delivery because we had a business case for what we…
Well, if you thought that a telecom spending spree or an enterprise market flush with unexpected cash were going to drive Cisco and the industry to unprecedented growth, Cisco’s call likely disabused you of that notion. While Cisco beat most estimates very slightly, its guidance was considered tepid and certainly the continued references to “challenging…
Cisco reports its earnings tonight, so you might wonder why I’d blog about Cisco before the Big Event. The answer is that I’m not blogging about what Cisco did in the last quarter, but what it’s facing in 2014 (I may get to that last quarter on my blog on Thursday!) Chambers has been very…
We have a bit of an interesting counterpoint story this morning, involving the future of networking and how we navigate transitions. Let’s open with Blackberry, who has announced they will be forming an activity to seek bids for JVs, acquisitions, or whatever. Blackberry was the darling of the mobile phone space prior to the iPhone,…
T-Mobile has been shaking up the mobile industry with its no-contract-and-phone-upgrades plans, and they’ve worked to gain post-pay customers for the carrier, not a first but certainly a recent first. The problem is that this “good news” really isn’t more than a “transient good” because this model isn’t sustainable. Suppose you’re in the milk business. …
NSN has changed ownership but not its name, it’s simply changed what the acronym decodes to. “Nokia Solutions and Networks” is actually kind of appropriate at two levels. First, obviously, it conveys Nokia’s sole ownership of the venture. Second, it conveys that what NSN has been turning into is a “solutions” or professional services player. …
We’re a long way from the scheduled end of the ETSI NFV ISG’s work, but the initiative is already spawning implementations and perhaps a tad of NFV-washing. We have two more NFV-related announcements to talk about today, in fact. One represents the “mainstream” of NFV activity among vendors and the other represents a second orchestration…
There are always two components to any software-based solution to a problem—the software that implements the solution and the platform that software runs on. It’s not uncommon for us to take the latter for granted, but in the world of virtualization that’s a big mistake. For SDN and NFV in particular, platforms are really important…
One of the primary design goals of CloudNFV was to create a viable management framework for networks composed in whole or in part from virtual or cloud-hosted functions. Along the way we needed to deal with another of our principles; that the cloud, SDN, and NFV had to be united into a single concept. While…